5 Steps to Jump-Start Your Adoption Efforts

You may be here because you’ve spent a good chunk of the last year (or two) designing, building, and launching a great new platform, and...either people aren’t using your platform or, worse, they’re using it wrong.

First of all, you’re not alone. There’s a reason that industry data suggest that a high percentage of transformation projects fail to meet their anticipated return on investment. That’s probably not a lot of solace when your senior leadership is tapping their pencils looking for you to demonstrate business value against their investment. So, whether you just rolled out a new BI platform, a CRM, or an end-to-end ERP, you’re now faced with a new challenge. And, to show leadership the value of the platform, you will need better adoption and accurate usage.

Let’s look at five steps you can take now to jump-start an adoption campaign.

1) Understand your users

If you’re having adoption challenges, step one is to pivot away from your platform’s performance and develop a deeper understanding of your target users.

“Build it and they will come” rarely works.

“They’ll use it because I told them to” works only marginally better.

You have to win hearts and minds. To do that, develop a deeper understanding of your target users and the leaders of those groups. You’ll want to sit in on town halls, team meetings, and have a good number of 1:1 interviews to deepen your understanding of what’s going to convince them to ‘eat what you’ve cooked.’ You should have a crystal-clear line of sight to things like:

• What challenges is this group facing with their current (legacy) platform?
• What are their business needs and priorities? What do the groups need to get done to meet their goals this year?
• What drives their behavior day-to-day? What are they incentivized to do?
• How do they communicate to each other and how do they prefer to get information from their leaders?

Once you’ve got a deeper understanding of your different stakeholder groups, you’ll want to build a persona for each of the core groups who should be using your platform to center your approach based on their needs and wants. Don’t be tempted to oversimplify down to one perspective: what will engage one group likely will not engage another.

This understanding, or empathy, for your business users is your foundation. It will help you frame a revised story and capture potential future features for your platform roadmap and give you a better sense of how to gain their trust and business.

2) Focus on value from your customers’ perspectives

Now that you’ve spent time understanding your target audience, build a plan to retell your story with a focus on what your users care about. Schedule roadshows, lunch and learns, direct meetings with influential mid- and senior-level leaders in those business units. Make creative communications like videos and demo walkthroughs that are fast, fun, and easy to consume.

Think 60 Seconds rather than 60 Minutes.

You have an engagement framework in place now — but with all of these stories, slides, videos, and emails — make sure you’re leveraging what you found out in step 1. Tell the story from their perspective. What is the new platform going to do for them? It’s an easy trap to list bullets of all the great functionality: sort of a version of the release notes. Most users won’t read them, and they won’t drive adoption. Focus on how your platform is going to help each group achieve their objectives more effectively and target the story.

One recent project team had a sales group who felt that there were far too many clicks to get to their performance dashboards — and it was going to be resolved in their new platform. Featuring that single improvement in communications to that group, since it was identified by them, as their pain point, grabbed their attention more quickly than a long list of great features. Another regional sales group in the organization spent a lot of time in airports and on airplanes. To that group, new mobile functionality was critical. Yet another group really wanted an easier way to enter sales meeting notes. Having three different stories targeting each of the different groups would help to build excitement and enthusiasm across the different groups and all for the same platform.

3) Reward and recognize target behaviors

Using a new platform means changing behaviors. Perhaps users are shifting from tracking in email, spreadsheets, or even hard copy, to your new platform. Identify what those behavior changes are and reward the new target behaviors. Here are a couple ideas:

• Carve a small bit of your budget to do giveaways. For example, run a gift card lottery for users who log in, or use a new data field, during a period of time. “One lucky user this week will win a gift card to…”
• Make a post on your intranet celebrating a team who’s made a change, and tag their (and your) leadership teams.
• Identify your top users and highlight them. Ask them: “How do you use the new platform?” or “What is one way it helps you execute against your priorities?” Name those teams in a Top Users / Top Teams dashboard that rolls up to their, or your, leadership.

Make adoption stories a big deal — and the little things will start to snowball and grow. Where possible, work with group leaders to capture how your platform is helping achieve their goals and objectives. Nothing drives behavior like contributing to solving the big problems leaders are focused on.

4) Choose your battles

On a recent project, a platform owner built a platform that met all the technical requirements, but after launch had almost no adoption. The platform owner had hundreds of business units to win over. When we began working on the project, there was a sense of “We must win every battle!” which was resulted in few big wins overall, and frustration and disappointment. We worked with the core team to analyze the critical business units on two axes. First: How attached to the status quo is this team? Second: How influential are they in the big story? We plotted the results and drew a curve indicating the initial targets for adoption — business units who were both amenable to the change and who had some level of cache within the larger enterprise. Narrowing down from 200 targets to 5 became immediately less daunting. Combined with the user analysis from step one, we now had targeted story lines, functionality focus points and an opportunity to leverage relationships to begin driving more adoption stories and wins.

This Small Wins approach helps drive your storyline. Groups who get on your bus become part of your advocacy team: your internal champions to help drive the adoption momentum.

Pick a few winnable battles and go after them hard.

5) Capture and communicate your small wins

You’ve got the story, you’ve got your targets, you’ve gone out to build and evangelize across the business, and you’re starting to get some adoption. Now — capture every incremental win, no matter how small it may appear. Logins have gone up by 5% month over month? Capture it. Throughput has increased a fraction? Capture it. One group has decided they actually love the platform? Capture it. You’ve incrementally decreased cost or time for a process? Capture it. Document those stories, talk to the user teams, and get some quotes. Put them in a rollup report to your leadership team and the broader community. Celebrate with your team who’s probably been working really hard and needs to put a couple wins in their columns.

Aside from the pressure of a mandate, very little drives people’s behavior like watching the person in the next cube (or meeting window) gain accolades and shout outs for doing something you can easily do.

Gaining adoption is always easier when it’s begun early in the project process: building alignment and awareness from business leaders before you’ve formally launched is an intensive and ongoing effort, but pays big dividends when it comes time to capture your ROI. However, long term adoption efforts often fall victim to short term budget constraints. You’re on a new journey to turn your program around — engage with your users and get them on the trip with you. Remember, this isn’t a one-time, one-size-fits-all effort, you’re on a mission to build adoption and make it a formal part of your culture. Let me know how it goes.